Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Tooth-cleaning was also a fearful event. Boys who were able to brush their own teeth were at a definite advantage here. I was an in-between. On a good day I could manage it, but when the weather was really cold my joints seized up altogether, and I couldn’t reach. I went through the motions as well as I could, knowing the consequences if she singled me out. I had a special toothbrush, but it wasn’t all that special. It was special in a very ordinary way. It was only a normal toothbrush with a stick (a piece of dowelling) tied to the handle to extend my reach. Apart from the question of reach there was also the problem of getting the right angle.

She caught a boy slacking once, as she thought, and seeing that he wasn’t able to reach very well, she said: ‘Don’t you even know how to clean your teeth properly? Let me show you — and pay attention everybody!’ She put a good squeeze of paste onto the boy’s brush, then pulled his head back by his hair. She told him to open his mouth and started brushing. Or rather I should say she started agitating her hand. Her mouth twisted itself in a frenzy, while she transferred her sense of her own inner dirtiness into the mouth of the boy. He whimpered a bit, but she hissed, ‘Quiet!’ and increased the vibration rate. ‘This is the way to clean out a boy’s dirty mouth!’ she said. ‘And the only way you can tell when it’s really clean is to draw blood!’

Draw blood she did. When she told the poor boy to rinse his mouth the basin was streaked with pink. Blood trickled from his lips. ‘There, that feels much better, doesn’t it?’ Judy Brisby demanded. The poor boy agreed through his mouthful of minty blood that yes, it was better now. Ever so much better. I don’t think she necessarily intended to draw blood, but when she saw the bleeding she declared it a good and necessary thing. It was either that or put the brakes on, maybe even apologise, and she wasn’t going to do either of those things.

After we’d all been cleaned and delivered downstairs by way of that sluggish lift we had our breakfast, which was cold whatever the weather. Bread-and-butter and marmalade and Puffed Wheat. Only the tea was reasonably hot. There were four people at each table, one member of staff and three boys, and on the table there was a toast rack which held four half-pieces of wholemeal toast. This was for staff only.

Mostly the staff ate their full entitlement of toast. It was a small enough perk in an unglamorous job. But Biggie always made sure that three of her pieces of toast were given away, and so did Gillie. Judy Brisby’s table was run differently. She would take a tiny nibble of her toast and then sit there, chewing very slowly, as if lost in her thoughts. Of course she knew exactly what she was doing. She could make that slice last all day. She would certainly stretch things out so that she was still on her first piece of toast when the table was cleared and we had to get ready for lessons. Not that the other slices will have gone to waste. I dare say the kitchen staff were rationed as much as any of us, but if they turned up their noses at the cold toast we so much coveted then it will have gone to the pigs.

One of the asthmatic ABs, called David Lockett, a tremendous animal lover, kept pigs. It wasn’t the school’s project, he did it entirely on his own initiative. He had special permission, and he looked after them with superb devotion and efficiency. David always said that he was going to be a farmer in Australia, and since ABs weren’t automatically debarred from pursuing their ambitions, as most of us were, there’s no reason to think he didn’t manage to do what he wanted.

Judy Brisby was sly enough to realise that if no one ever got a bite of her toast we would learn to ignore her nibbling routine. So there would be a small act of sharing every now and then, always in favour of the boy who abased himself most shamelessly in front of her.

My toady self

One breakfast time I qualified. As an avid reader of Æsop’s fables in CRX, I had learned the moral that if you praise the crow’s beautiful song you can steal the titbit (a piece of toast, say) when it opens its beak to sing. The toast had long since lost all its original warmth, of course, and Judy had smeared it with the thinnest possible scrape of butter, the most grudging dab of jam. As I ate it I tried to feel that it held at least a symbolic warmth, the memory of its charring, but all I could taste was my toady self. My mouth was full of the bitter juices of sycophancy.

After breakfast I could feel that the worst part of the day was behind me, and that Vulcan School was really an OK place to be. I made a solemn vow, in the days of the Blue Dorm, that when I left school I would never again expose this body to the indignity of receiving a cold shock first thing in the morning.

The cold at Vulcan was always presented by the authorities as having a healthful, bracing aspect. It didn’t occur to me that this, like many other features of the school, was really a matter of economics.

Mum had explained to me that Cromer, the name of the man she had married and consequently my surname, was a resort town in East Anglia where it was always cold and windy. There had been a vogue in early Victorian times for healthful bracing resorts, where the north wind could be relied on to blow away all thoughts of lounging and to impose a régime of brisk walks, well wrapped up. ‘But who’d want to go to a place like that?’ I wanted to know. She couldn’t really give an answer. She had never gone there herself.

I suppose I should pay a visit one of these days — see Cromer and die. I’m not interested in family history, not really believing in either family or history. I’m in two minds about geography, come to that. Anyway, it stands to reason that my forebears weren’t called Cromer when they lived there — they got that name at the next town they moved to, when they were the people from Cromer.

The turret of the Blue Dorm made Cromer seem like Barbados, but the Spartan conditions weren’t entirely meant. Feather beds would sap the moral fibre, certainly — but feather beds were also expensive. When I had left CRX and come to Vulcan I had moved, without realising it, from the care of an institution with resources to one without. The difference was masked by their shared ideas about the young, and the dire consequences of mollycoddling. Thrift was the over-riding style of things, so that actual poverty didn’t show up so much.

The Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital, set up on a historic estate, had been richly endowed from the first day it was offered to the authorities. The Astors had provided more than the premises, paying the wages of staff. When the National Health Service was established, CRX was smoothly absorbed into it. CRX was a benefactor with a little body fat on it — Sister Heel’s gleeful mug-smashing and Dr Ansell’s matter-of-fact insistence on linen sheets for children were extravagances that could be indulged. If the toilet paper was hard, that was because the soft variety was morally suspect, not because it cost too much.

Old Boys’ reunion in the sky

The Vulcan School was different, the Vulcan School was skin and bones. It had only the most tenuous and long-delayed claim on public resources. The school opened on personal loans, with one pupil, and laboured to build up to official size and status. It was hard for local authorities to send pupils until this critical mass was reached. Things that might be classed as necessities, such as a lift so that wheelchair-bound children could ascend to the dormitories upstairs, were installed only as funds allowed. Vulcan was an undernourished orphan taking in others of its own kind, without having secured its own place in the world.